The power of III

11 November 2011

Mr. Obama was the first Democrat to win Virginia since 1964; he beat John McCain by seven percentage points; and he did so on the strength of his appeal to Northern Virginia's many white-collar independents. Along with victories in North Carolina, Colorado and Nevada, the Obama Old Dominion win in 2008 inspired a flurry of stories about how Democrats had forever altered the political map.

Now, 2011:

Every Republican incumbent—52 in the House, 15 in the Senate—won. The state GOP is looking at unified control over government for only the second time since the Civil War.

and:

Elected state Democrats—who form the backbone of grass-roots movements—couldn't distance themselves far enough from Mr. Obama in this race.Most refused to mention the president, to defend his policies, or to appear with him. The more Republicans sought to nationalize the Virginia campaign, the more Democrats stressed local issues.

and:

Virginia Democrats were happy to identify with one top official: Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell, who is providing a lesson in the benefits of smart GOP governance in battleground states. Criticized as being too socially conservative for Virginia when he was elected in 2009, Mr. McDonnell has won over voters by focusing on the economy and jobs. His approval ratings are in the 60s, and he helped raise some $5 million for local candidates. He's popular enough that Democrats took to including pictures of him in their campaign literature, and bragging that they'd worked with him.

They are made out of silicone, with ink injected debossed letters and star.

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Suggestions:Sons of Confederate VeteransUnited Daughters of the ConfederacyLeague of the South

Cheers.

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Both versions have this as the front, version two has nothing on back.

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New Version One has "States' Rights" on the back, correcting the punctuation

On November 10, 1865 Captain Henry Wirz, CSA, guarded by four companies of soldiers, was led to the gallows in the Old Capital Prison yard before some 250 spectators who had government issued tickets. The spectators chanted "remember Andersonville" as Wirz ascended the stairway of the gallows. A hood was placed over Wirz's head and the rope around his neck. Wirz last words reportedly were that he was being hanged for following orders. The trap door was sprung open at 10:32 a.m. stretching the rope as it suddenly bore Wirz's weight. Wirz's neck was not broken by the fall and he writhed about as he slowly died of stangulation. The crowd openly displayed satisfaction that Wirz was dead. The public had been made aware of the deaths caused by autrocious conditions at Andersonville; the press had printed photographs of the worst of the surviving prisoners; those prisoners who had survived despised Wirz; the public had cried out for vengeance and all had waited through a trial lasting sixty-three days for retribution to be had. Forgiveness was not possible as reflected by Walt Whitman regarding Andersonville when he wrote, " There are deeds, crimes that may be forgiven but this is not among them. It steeps its perpetrators in blackest, escapless, endless damnation."

The crowd chanted while he slowly strangled.

By far the most damaging testimony against Wirz was that of Felix de la Baume. De la Baume was the only witness who identified a victim by name who was alleged to have been directly killed by Wirz. De la Baume, who claimed to be a Frenchman and descendant of Lafayette, was discovered after the trial, to actually be Felix Oeser. Oeser was born in Saxony, Prussia and lied in order to help conceal that he was a former member of the 7th New York Volunteers who had deserted during the war. He was a skilled orator and so impressed the commission that he was given a written commendation signed by all of the members regarding his testimony. He was also appointed to a position in the Department of the Interior before Wirz's trial ended. Once his true identify and status was discovered, only eleven days after Wirz had been hung, he admitted being Oeser and to having perjured himself in the testimony at Wirz's trial. Oeser subequently vanished into obscurity.

Union Army Lt. James Madison:
(During the Summer of 1864)

" July brought unusual suffering to the prisoners on account of the hot weather."

The suffering caused the initiation of a petition by the prisoners for reinstatement of prisoner exchanges. Four were paroled to go to Washington and three returned to report their request had been refused.

(Following the return of the paroled emissaries to Washington).

"When we heard [Secretary of War] Stanton's reply in regard to exchange [reinstatement], we felt we were forsaken by our Government. The War Office at Washington preferred us to die rather than exchange us." "Many of the prisoners, being but human, raised their clenched, trembling hands towards heaven and with fearful oaths cursed the authorities at Washington, and the day they were born. Oh what hatred was engendered for our Secretary of War."

(On meeting Henry Wirz).

"I met Wirz while on one of his visits to the hospital. He stopped his horse, and I explained briefly the situation and the condition of my comrades. Said I, 'If something is not done for them at once, in a few days death will be the result,' and this is the substance of his reply: 'I am doing all I can. I am handicapped and pressed for rations. I am exceeding my authority now in issuing supplies. I am blamed by the soldiers for all this suffering. They do not realize I am a subordinate, governed by orders of my commanding officer. Why, sir, my own men are on short rations. The best that I can do is to see that your sick comrades are removed to the hospital. God help you, I cannot.,' and his eyes were filled with tears. I was crying myself. I saw how deeply he felt. He was pale and emaciated. His wounded arm was troubling him - he said nothing about the fact that gangrene had set in. I said to myself, 'Here is a man obliged to endure the odium resulting from the sins of others.'"

(While Wirz was on sick leave during the month of August).

"Scurvy is now fearfully prevalent. Hundreds are dying daily. It is caused by not having proper food - a change of food is absolutely necessary to relieve scurvy.
Captain Wirz was absent on sick leave for the month of August. Lieutenant Davis was in command and he did all that he could to alleviate the suffering. From all sides could be heard from men who had said derogatory things of Wirz, 'I wish the Captain was back.'"

---These excerpts are taken from a law school website which published original source material. A heartfelt letter from Capt. Wirz's defense lawyer written after the execution is here, if you wish to read further.

I am convinced that Wirz was scapegoated, and used as a pawn to try to implicate President Jefferson Davis as a Lincoln assassination conspirator.

Poor Wirz! What a wretched fate! What happened to him could have, and probably would have happened to anyone assigned at that post.

The federal government should be held to blame for their part in refusing prisoner exchange while at the same time enacting the scorched earth policy that afflicted the Georgia countryside. Both of those issues contributed needlessly to the death and suffering at Andersonville. In addition, the trial was full of perjury and unsubstantiated claims. Walt Whitman should have thought about the Federal authorities in charge of this Travesty when he wrote:

" There are deeds, crimes that may be forgiven but this is not among them. It steeps its perpetrators in blackest, escapless, endless damnation."

Why would any government official with an ounce of common sense think it’s a good idea to facilitate the smuggling of thousands of guns into the hands of violent Mexican drug cartels? That’s what Operation Fast and Furious did.

You might think Eric Holder’s Department of Justice was setting up a sting operation in which our federal agents would swoop down and arrest the bad guys the minute the guns traded hands. But that’s not what happened. Eric Holder’s DOJ had American gun dealers sell weapons to “straw purchasers” tied to drug cartels without actually following the movement of the guns as they were then sold to Mexican drug lords. They apparently thought this so-called “gun-walking” operation would help them chart the path of gun smuggling, but they didn’t have a plan to actually control the weapons’ movements as the guns were allowed to “walk” into Mexico. All Holder’s DOJ did was arm violent criminals. What manner of fools do we have working in this administration? What’s next? Supplying nuclear weapons components to the Iranians so we can track their activities?

Fast and Furious isn’t just your typical government incompetence. This is a deadly tragedy. U.S. border agent Brian Terry was gunned down with weapons connected to Holder’s debacle. At least 200 Mexican citizens were also killed by criminals using Fast and Furious weapons. We can only imagine how many more people will be murdered by criminals our government armed.

10 November 2011

WASHINGTON -- Government screeners every day confiscate four to five guns -- some of them loaded -- packed in carry-on luggage at the nation's airports, a sign that travelers "are not focused on the security protocols," the head of the Transportation Security Administration said Wednesday at a Senate hearing.

Hey, look, another loaded gun!

TSA Administrator John PIstole testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs about the state of aviation security 10 years after the TSA's creation in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001. He confirmed the daily weapons haul in response to a point raised by Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the ranking Republican on the committee, who noted a loaded gun was found Tuesday on a passenger at Bradley International Airport in Hartford, Conn. "We face a determined foe," she said.

TSA officers have prevented more than 940 guns from getting on board planes at checkpoints nationwide this year alone. Pistole did not specify whether people caught trying to bring guns aboard aircraft did so with ill intent, were unaware that guns were prohibited, or had forgotten they had packed them.

"Your people are finding four or five weapons a day, and not in checked bags," said Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who chairs the committee. "Just think about what could be done to the other passengers. So what the TSA officers are doing is for the protection of the general public."

Ok. Joe Lieberman is a disgusting fearmonger and statist, but I knew that before I read this article.

"We face a determined foe"Note how there are no specifics. The first paragraph actually only references travellers, not terrorists.How many were legally owned by permit holders? How many were known criminals with no intent?How many were terrorists? What background does each have?

Uh, that knife I had to throw out in Fort Lauderdale airport, because I had no time to mail it home, late for the flight...I forgot it was in my pocket....

Am I in the statistics as someone stopped at security with a knife?

On critical analysis, this testimony is typical fed.gov obfuscation to keep up the illusion that Das Blauen Hemden, er, I mean, the Blue Shirts are necessary, doing a bang-up job, and most importantly, deserve their budget.

09 November 2011

The Dover Air Force Base mortuary for years disposed of some dead troops’ body parts by burning them and dumping the ashes in a Virginia landfill, a practice that officials have since abandoned in favor of burying the remains at sea.

The Dover mortuary, which is the main point of entry for America’s war dead, sent remains to the landfill from 2003 until 2008, according to Air Force officials. The manner of disposal was typically withheld from the relatives of fallen service members. The disclosure comes in the aftermath of several federal investigations into mishandling of remains at the mortuary.

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Well, I guess that's cheaper than treating the remains like they were your kin.

Whaddya know? I've just reached a new level of disgust with the US gubmint...didn't think it was possible.

But contrast this story with the Israelis:

Link to wikipedia; Zaka is the abbreviation for the hebrew meaning "Disaster Victim Identification."

In 2010, ZAKA volunteers numbered 1,500.[3] These volunteers work in coordination with Israeli government agencies on any unnatural death including vehicle accidents, terrorist bombing, murder or suicide. Trained as paramedics and in first aid, the volunteers, who are on call 24/7, attempt to revive the victims and, if unsuccessful, respectfully attend to the dead.[3]

ZAKA also has two units made up of Bedouin, Muslim, and Druze volunteers to serve Israel’s non-Jewish communities, primarily Bedouin in the Negev and Druze in the Galilee. According to both Jewish and Muslim religious law, it is important to treat the dead respectfully, whether it be covering the bodies so that others cannot see them or collecting every last body part for burial, including blood.

I personally have seen members of Zaka, down on the ground on their hands and knees (after a terrorist attack in Jerusalem in 2003), scraping small bits of flesh, and scraping blood off the street, for a proper burial.

So I say to whomever decided to chuck out bits of US Servicemen (i.e. the best of us, who sacrificed all) in a dump: For shame! Disgusting!

The government golden rule: Treat others however it suits you, after you take their ____ (fill in blank).

For Immediate Release – (November 8, 2011) – On the eve of the 213th anniversary of the passage of Thomas Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, laying the intellectual groundwork of nullification, the people of Ohio exercised their power and nullified the insurance mandate in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Ohioans passed Issue Three, a constitutional amendment to preserve their right to choose their own health care and health care coverage. Preliminary returns indicated a wide margin of victory, with more than 60 percent approving the amendment. The amendment makes it illegal for any local, state or federal law to require Ohio residents to purchase health insurance, effectively nullifying a key component of the PPACA.

System D is a slang phrase pirated from French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean. The French have a word that they often use to describe particularly effective and motivated people. They call themdébrouillards. To say a man is a débrouillard is to tell people how resourceful and ingenious he is. The former French colonies have sculpted this word to their own social and economic reality. They say that inventive, self-starting, entrepreneurial merchants who are doing business on their own, without registering or being regulated by the bureaucracy and, for the most part, without paying taxes, are part of "l'economie de la débrouillardise." Or, sweetened for street use, "Systeme D." This essentially translates as the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself, or DIY, economy.

In 2009, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a think tank sponsored by the governments of 30 of the most powerful capitalist countries and dedicated to promoting free-market institutions, concluded that half the workers of the world -- close to 1.8 billion people -- were working in System D: off the books, in jobs that were neither registered nor regulated, getting paid in cash, and, most often, avoiding income taxes.

A 2009 study by Deutsche Bank, the huge German commercial lender, suggested that people in the European countries with the largest portions of their economies that were unlicensed and unregulated -- in other words, citizens of the countries with the most robust System D -- fared better in the economic meltdown of 2008 than folks living in centrally planned and tightly regulated nations.

"I'm totally off the grid," one unlicensed jewelry designer told me. "It was never an option to do it any other way. It never even crossed my mind. It was financially absolutely impossible." The growth of System D opens the market to those who have traditionally been shut out.

The dilemma that this country — and no less many other countries — has to face is very serious. The extremely popular method of raising wage rates above the height the unhampered labor market would have established would produce catastrophic mass unemployment if inflationary credit expansion were not to rescue it. But inflation has not only very pernicious social effects. It cannot go on endlessly without resulting in the complete breakdown of the whole monetary system. -- Ludwig von Mises

07 November 2011

Quote of the Day, spoken about Europe, but valid about our welfare system and nanny state as well: via al Jazeera via Drudgereport.com:

"If you look at the troubles which happened in European countries, this is purely because of the accumulated troubles of the worn out welfare society. I think the labour laws are outdated. The labour laws induce sloth, indolence, rather than hardworking. The incentive system, is totally out of whack.

"Why should, for instance, within [the] eurozone some member's people have to work to 65, even longer, whereas in some other countries they are happily retiring at 55, languishing on the beach? This is unfair. The welfare system is good for any society to reduce the gap, to help those who happen to have disadvantages, to enjoy a good life, but a welfare society should not induce people not to work hard."

Jin Liqun, the supervising chairman of China's sovereign wealth fund

The way the laws are written in the US, not only is there no incentive to get off welfare, there are incentives to not get married (singles can collect more welfare than a married couple), one of the factors in the erosion of the family unit among the poor in the United States:

The researchers aim to demystify welfare’s complicated rules, which even Moffitt, who has spent his career studying labor economics and the welfare system, says he sometimes has trouble understanding. While most social scientists regard marriage as better for the children involved, individual states’ welfare policies don’t appear to support married parents, Moffitt says. In general, if a mother, a father and their children are living in the same house, regardless of the parents’ marital status, the family won’t be eligible for welfare because their income will almost always be too high. Yet, if the mother and children are living on their own, with family or are cohabiting with a partner who is not the father of the children, the mother and children would be eligible for welfare, even if they are also being financially supported by other adults in the house.

“The bad part is, you are telling the mother that if she brings in a man who is not the father of her children, it’s OK, but if she brings in the father of her children, she’ll be kicked off welfare,” Moffitt said. --Link

While you might guess where my position might fall on the idea of secession, I provide these links for my readers to enjoy, and hope to make the time to read the different posts and comments and see if I can add anything substantial to the discussion:

I have been trying to build up a business that I bought over the summer, and haven't even had time to read the news, let alone blog, lately, much to my disappointment. I am going to try to get out a few posts this week.

About Me

Father of three, religious, distrustful of any authority not able to consistently demonstrate competency at its mandated task. Lineally descended physically and spiritually from colonial leadership, Revolutionary War veterans, and veterans of the War of Northern Aggression.